SELWESKI: Dems best hope lies with the gun nuts

Those activists who hoped the heart-wrenching Sandy Hook slaughter served as a turning point in the battle over gun restrictions now find that many Senate Democrats are off target and that the president seems most interested in pushing executive orders that miss the mark.

Maybe the gun control advocates’ best hope lies with the right-wing gun nuts who have demonstrated such paranoia and bizarre behavior in recent weeks that perhaps their mental health — and subsequent right to own a gun — should be questioned.

On the Internet and on YouTube, gun zealots warn that they will be ready to fight when the government “comes to take my guns.” They warn of an impending civil war where “we may have to shed blood” and “start killing people.” These testosterone-infused rebels have packed gun shops to buy even more firearms and they have organized anti-Obama rallies where they speak in ominous tones.

The most vile conspiracy theories claim that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax. Some of these despicable right-wingers say the murders of 20 first-graders never happened; others claim the distraught parents and neighbors of Newtown seen in TV media interviews are actually professional actors. In some cases, the people of Newtown have been subjected to unsettling phone calls and email.

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The best thing the Democrats have going for them is that these ugly claims that the Obama administration manufactured a phony massacre to gin up support for “gun grabbing” are not fading — in fact, they’re one of the most popular topics on YouTube, Twitter, websites and blogs.

Of course, I suspect many of the millions of Google searches on the subject “Sandy Hook hoax” are initiated by people fascinated/disgusted with the lunacy demonstrated by gun lovers.

Maybe the Democrats should hire Ted Nugent to serve as the spokesman for opposition to gun legislation.

This irrational backlash against a fairly mild legislative scenario, this sky-is-falling approach, is also taking place in state capitols across the nation where so-called Firearms Freedom Acts are being introduced by Republicans in a (legally dubious) attempt to exempt their state from any new federal gun laws. In Michigan the leader of the pack is a state senator from St. Clair, Phil Pavlov, who I suspect is salivating at the opportunity to become a favorite of the politically powerful National Rifle Association.

Ironically, national support for gun restrictions has shot up in several polls since the Newtown massacre, giving the Democrats further ammunition to claim that those ready to go to war (literally) over basic issues like background checks and magazine clips are far out of the mainstream.

Yet, support among several Senate Democrats from the South and West seems tepid, at best.

And the president’s 23 executive actions and orders signed on Wednesday — which had prompted calls for impeachment and vows by Western sheriffs to defy federal law — emerged, upon closer inspection, as fairly vanilla. Basically, the president told the federal bureaucracy to do a better job on matters such as background checks and research and extending Medicaid coverage.

In Washington, the war of words over guns seems to have caused skittish lawmakers to circle around just two popular issues: ending the gun show loophole on background checks, which currently allows 40 percent of gun sales to occur without any scrutiny; and limiting semiautomatic gun magazines to 10 bullets per clip, as the president has proposed, or something close to that.

One new poll shows that an eye-popping 90 percent of Americans, including the vast majority of NRA members, favor background checks for all firearms purchases. And about 70 percent back an end to the sale of the 15- to 30-shot magazines used by the shooters in several recent massacres.

The more the NRA and its most ardent supporters cry foul about Obama and the Democrats trying to “destroy the Second Amendment,” the less credibility they will have with the public on these two core, common sense issues.

Still, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, an NRA supporter, is trying to circumvent momentum and try to run out the clock by promising only that a vote will take place later this year on the gun bills introduced by his fellow Democrats.

With the House sitting back, insisting the Senate vote first on gun legislation, liberals cranked up the noise about “spineless” Democrats who don’t want to become an NRA target by supporting anything proposed by the president.

At the center of this emerging intraparty feud are senators such as John Tester and Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Begich of Alaska.

Maybe there will be a trade-off, with these rogue Democrats allowed to seize the spotlight in a crackdown on particularly bloody movies and video games, plus advocating changes to the mental health system, in exchange for casting the “deciding” votes against a ban on so-called assault weapons.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy theories aimed at the president are approaching the outlandishness of the birther movement. The NRA, with its heavily criticized ad referring to Obama’s young daughters, showed that they are ready to get down in the muck.

After all, the NRA’s main man, Wayne LaPierre, must shore up his credibility with gun owners who are not as passionate about this issue as are his rabid fans. LaPierre spent most of 2008 warning that Obama would be the worst president in history with regard to the Second Amendment. In reality, the president spent the past four years disappointing gun control advocates to the point that the Brady Campaign gave him an “F” grade for his first term.

So, LaPierre spent the 2012 campaign warning his membership that Obama’s passive approach toward gun issues in his first term was a ruse. At one gathering of conservatives he said the administration’s “lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.”

NRA members may buy that sales pitch a second time but the reality is that, the louder LaPierre talks, the more likely his hyperbole will turn off average suburban voters — especially those with young children or grandchildren like the Sandy Hook victims.

At the same time, the Dems may want to run some TV ads that rely upon the YouTube videos on gun control that have been collectively viewed millions of times in recent weeks. One featured David Lory Vanderbeek, who plans to run for governor of Nevada in 2014 on a platform that the state must prepare to resist martial law, which Obama will declare shortly.

“This is where we, as Americans, unite against a tyrant,” he said in the video clip, “and castrate his illegitimate presidency.”